Regardless of what some people might say, I promise not to believe that this really is your baby picture. I couldn't help laughing though when I saw it. Please excuse me.
bttt
Posted on 08/11/2006 11:54:04 AM PDT by presidio9
Regardless of the extensive testing (you claim), it is still a THEORY, thus not a proven fact.
Science today loves to start with a theory and then constuct convenient facts to support same and ignore other facts that would tend to dispute their theory. Junk science is rampant in academia today.
Find the missing link, then you might convince me that man evolved from apes.
Interesting comments. Thanks for sharing. I can agree with much of what you have said.
Evolution is a well-tested theory supported by the evidence, just like electro-magnitism, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. No one claims otherwise.
Theories are the ultimate goal of science. Theories organize and explain facts. A theory never "graudates" to fact. You are very confused, I see.
Science today loves to start with a theory and then constuct convenient facts to support same and ignore other facts that would tend to dispute their theory.
You've got it exactly wrong. Science starts with facts and constructs a hypothesis to explain them. Empirical implications of the hypothesis are derived and then tested. If the tests come out as the hypothesis predicts, it graduates to a theory.
This is exactly the same path evolution followed. Darwin observed various facts. From the geologists, he learned that life changed drastically over long periods of time (geologists already knew the Earth was old long before Darwin). From his own observations, he saw natural selection at work. He saw that species best adapted to their envioronment are more likely to reproduce, and tend to pass on their traits to their offspring. He hypothesized that this process is responsible for the vast changes in life that the geologists observed.
His hypothesis had many empirical implications: that geologists would find transitional species, that there is a biological mechanism for variation in traits and for the passing of those traits down to other offspring, that man's ancestors would be most likely found in Africa, that whales' ancestors would be found to have walked on land, and many, many more. All of these empirical implications have been confirmed, making the hypothesis graduate to a well-tested theory.
Junk science is rampant in academia today.
Not in the hard sciences like biology.
Find the missing link, then you might convince me that man evolved from apes.
The links aren't missing. We have lots of them. See PatrickHenry's page for just a small sampling.
Thanks!
"About 2/3rds of Scientists believe in god. 62% of people in the Natural Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) believe in God. Maybe Christians shouldn't believe anything you say?" ~ DNA-RNA-AA
Sorry for the late response - I just noticed your post a little bit ago.
In addition to the comments by Francis Collins and Owen Gingerich at the link I provided in my post #109, here are a couple of other sources to back them up:
[1] Leading Scientists Still Reject God
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/sci_relig.htm
The popular media balyhoo the fiction that science is supportive of religion. A recent issue of Newsweek (July 20, 1998) featured a cover story "Science finds God" which gave many innocent readers the impression that scientists in droves were finding scientific "evidence" allowing for God and an afterlife and were jumping on the religion bandwagon. Some of these 1998 reports were stimulated by a June 1998 Science and the Spiritual Quest Conference organized by Robert John Russell, and sponsored by The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Since this is an organization devoted to the reconcilation of science and religion it's no surprise the the speakers were supportive of the idea of the possibility of god and/or an afterlife, though some of the papers were so speculative and abstruse that it's hard to tell whether they were profound philosophy or mere moonshine. One wonders whether some speakers came just for the stipend provided by the John Templeton Foundation. Several Nobel-Prize winning scientists gave papers at this meeting. The papers were mostly philosophical and speculative. No new hard evidence was produced. News reports failed to put these wishful speculations in perspective by pointing out that most scientists are, in fact, not religious. And the percent of "leading" scientists who hold religious beliefs has been declining from around 30% in 1914 to less than 10% in 1998. Wayne Spencer, editor of The Skeptical Intelligencer (a publication of the Association for Skeptical Inquiry) has provided me with this summary of an article in the journal Nature which documents this fact.
[Links to the CTNS are provided above, but this does not mean that I in any way endorse the opinions expressed at those web sites. For a detailed critique of these bogus science rationalizations, see Victor Stenger's excellent Has Science Found God?, a draft of an article for Astronomy magzaine. For a broader perspective on the science/religion questions, see these Religion and Philosophy links and these Science, Religion and Philosophy links. I also highly recommend Michael Koller's Essays on Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Also see the skeptic links on my web page.] Donald E. Simanek. http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/home.htm
[Summary of a paper that appeared in the 23 July 1998 issue of Nature by Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham: "Leading Scientists Still Reject God." Nature, 1998; 394, 313.]
Larson and Witham present the results of a replication of 1913 and 1933 surveys by James H. Leuba. In those surveys, Leuba mailed a questionnaire to leading scientists asking about their belief in "a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" and in "personal immortality". Larson and Witham used the same wording [as in the Leuba studies]...
The results were as follows (figures in %):
[snip] Click above link to see the chart]
The authors elaborated on these figures:
Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%.
Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality).
Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality).
Larson and Witham close their report with the following remarks:
As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools.... The booklet assures readers, 'Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral'.
NAS president Bruce Alberts said: 'There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists.' Our survey suggests otherwise."
There is a review of earlier studies of the religiosity of scientists at pp 180ff of:
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi and Michael Argyle. The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN: 0-415-12330-5 (hbk) or 0-415-12331-3 (pbk).
On the subject of eminent scientists, they mention unpublished data collected by one of the co-authors: "Beit-Hallahmi (1988) found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from." The reference is to: Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1988). The religiosity and religious affiliation of Nobel prize winners. Unpublished data.
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[2] http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/angier_24_5.htm
"....So why is it that most scientists avoid criticizing religion even as they decry the supernatural mind-set?......Scientists, however, are a far less religious lot than the American population, and, the higher you go on the cerebro-magisterium, the greater the proportion of atheists, agnostics, and assorted other paganites. According to a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God." (Interestingly, a slightly higher number, 7.9 percent, claimed to believe in "personal immortality," which may say as much about the robustness of the scientific ego as about anything else.) In other words, more than 90 percent of our elite scientists are unlikely to pray for divine favoritism, no matter how badly they want to beat a competitor to publication. Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University." ..."
Matchett-PI wrote: "I think that the fact that most scientists - especially in biology - today are atheists - is the reason Christians aren't willing to listen to anything they have to say."
RFC_Gal responded: "I assume you can provide a link or source to support that statement?"
Sure:
...The authors elaborated on these figures:
Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%.
Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality).
Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality).
See my post #168 above:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1681983/posts?page=168#168
bttt
Hahahaha
What is so funny?
Regardless of what some people might say, I promise not to believe that this really is your baby picture. I couldn't help laughing though when I saw it. Please excuse me.
bttt
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